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CHAPTER XV 

 ICELANDIC AFFAIRS 



French revolutionary war was answerable 

 for many unexpected side issues. Not a 

 small one was the idea of annexing Iceland 

 and the Faroes to the British Crown. And 

 it would have been done but for the normal restraint of 

 English statesmen. For once, Sir Joseph Banks was 

 a politician, and one with the makings of a statesman. 

 He saw his beloved Iceland a victim to helpless mis- 

 management ; its inhabitants poor, spiritless, and 

 lethargic ; and the island almost entirely out of touch 

 with European civilization. During the second half of the 

 eighteenth century there was probably no more miserable 

 people on the face of the globe than the Icelanders. Life 

 had little or no promise for them. Gaieties were to be 

 found among the Esquimaux and the Laplanders, as with 

 Otaheitans and Maoris, but not in Iceland. Banks's own 

 recollections, of 1772, were that " no Icelander was seen 

 to laugh ; not that he had any particular inclination for 

 gravity, but because nothing in the detail of his mode 

 of living seemed ever to excite him to gaiety, much less 

 to merriment or laughter." 



The cause of this apathy, upon the unvarying testi- 

 mony of observers, is found in the loss of their ancient 

 spirit through Danish domination. The energies which 

 trade and intercommunication with other countries 

 might have aroused were thwarted by the laws of Den- 

 mark, which treated its colony as purely a dependency, 



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